Word: trite
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years later the Sixth Symphony brought him further official plaudits. Outside Russia, music lovers were more critical. Shostakovich's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies combined spontaneous gusto, originality and nobility, with a curious taste for trite themes and musical horseplay, as if the composer were constantly fighting down an impulse to throw musical custard pies...
...makes mincemeat out of them, and it takes Pearl Harbor at the end of the picture to interest him in the glories of the life of a Marine. What should have been the thriller of the year develops into a rehash of Frank Merriwell, tame enough for Grandma, too trite for anyone else...
...Remarkable Andrew" is far from trite, but equally dull. Its rather weird plot concerns the plight of Andrew Long, a strait-laced city employee who is framed by crooked politicians. With the unseen help of the ghost of his namesake Andy Jackson (not to mention the spirits of Washington, Marshall, Jefferson, Franklin, etc.) Andrew Long finally manages to extricate himself. But for a while in the picture even his friends wonder a bit when they observe him talking to people they can't see. Meanwhile the audience is just as baffled by the superfluity of ghosts whose figures they...
...become semi-amusing at the end of the first act, and from there on turns into a really funny show, as the actors and the script lose their awkwardness. It never becomes first-rate comedy, however, because it is never really convincing. The plot and the characters are too trite to make it anything more than a clever drawing-room farce in which the characters speak and act as they are expected to in such a comedy, but as they never would in real life...
...would be trite to say that a course of study must be planned in the light of the war. No college has been able to avoid the war's impact. But it is not yet trite to point out that planning such a course of study does not mean choosing only courses in math and physics, with perhaps a little military Japanese thrown in. Liberal education has the special virtue of flexibility and breadth sufficient to cope with abnormal situations. It changes gradually, as the main lines of thought shift from age to age, but it is adaptable...